'Eat my flesh,' Jesus says, 'and drink my blood.' The Lord supplies us with these intimate nutrients, he delivers over his flesh and pours out his blood, and nothing is lacking for the growth of his children
If any one saith, that all Christians have power to administer the word, and all the sacraments; let him be anathema.
“Be anathema” means excommunicated.
Baptism pertains to the Church alone.
Whereas there can be but one Baptism, they think they can Baptize; they have abandoned the fountain of life, yet promise the life and grace of the waters of salvation. It is not cleansing which men find there, but soiling; their sins are not washed away, but only added to. That being "born again" does not bring forth sons to God but to the Devil. Born of a lie, they cannot inherit the things which Truth has promised; begotten by the faithless, they are deprived of the grace of faith.
What has always puzzled me is the flexibility of God's word. For instance, Catholics can now eat meat on Fridays. And limbo has been abolished. How does this work? Who tells them?
When the bee has gathered the dew of heaven and the earth's sweetest nectar from the flowers, it turns it into honey, then hastens to its hive. In the same way, the priest, having taken from the altar the Son of God (who is as the dew from heaven, and true son of Mary, flower of our humanity), gives him to you as delicious food.
Knowing that there is one Baptism, we who hold the head and root of the One Church know for certain that to him who is outside the Church nothing is lawful.
When I think how much my Protestant brothers and sisters are missing in not having Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist; when I kneel before the Eucharist and realize I am as truly in Christ's presence as the apostles were but that my Protestant brothers and sisters don't know that, don't believe that - I at first feel a terrible gap between myself and them. What a tremendous thing they are missing!
I am a Congregationalist with Catholic sensibilities. Which probably explains how I ended up in a Episcopal church.
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
St. Pope John XXIII called for the Second Vatican Council because he understood, as no Holy Father had in a long time, religion spoke to and found its language and symbols - its entire sense of the sacramental nature of existence - in the imagination that reveals not just the penalties of living, but the wonder and awe of our existence.
[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind.
There is no harm in anybody thinking that Christ is in bread. The harm is in the expectation of His presence in gunpowder.
Answer on being asked her opinion of Christ's presence in the Sacrament. 'Twas God the word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it; And what the word did make it That I believe, and take it.
I acknowledge that the sacrament of the altar is very God's body in form of bread, but it is in another manner God's body than it is in heaven.
I'm a traditionalist. I'm a Latin mass Catholic, and I hold to traditional views of responsibility.
But Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church-with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility-is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time.
When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?
It's very easy for a church just to slide along from week to week, taking it for granted that we do our services like this and that, and we celebrate the sacraments like this and that.
What wonderful majesty! What stupendous condescension! O sublime humility! That the Lord of the whole universe, God and the Son of God, should humble Himself like this under the form of a little bread, for our salvation ...In this world I cannot see the Most High Son of God with my own eyes, except for His Most Holy Body and Blood.
I have a profound belief in the power of the Sacraments. I believe that in a Divine way the use of them teaches the teachable their inward meaning and therefore I think we need be in no hurry to attempt to teach new converts all that we think we know about them.
[It is appropriate that the Body and Blood of Christ be truly present in this Sacrament] because of the perfection of the New Covenant. The sacrifices of the Old Covenant contained the true sacrifice of Christ's Passion only in symbol....Therefore it was necessary that the sacrifice of the New Covenant, instituted by Christ, have something more, namely, that it contain Christ Himself who has suffered and contain Him not only in symbol but in reality.
And this speaks to the larger problem that no one wants to talk about: the restoration of the Roman rite is a precondition for a long-term fix for the problem.
If one's careful study of the facts shows that the Catholic Church is correct about Jesus-his life, teachings, death, and Resurrection-then why not give the Church the benefit of the doubt and carefully study her reasons for rejecting contraception, homosexual acts, and women's ordination?
To deny that in a child after baptism sin remains is to treat with contempt both Paul and Christ.
